The Anthologist

In it was Roethke's review of his old flame, Louise Bogan. He adopts a formal tone-he keeps calling her Miss Bogan. And he quotes nice things from her poems-for instance he quotes "Roman Fountain." And he says, rightly, that the first stanza is good and the rest he doesn't care for as much. Bogan herself thought that. She said the poem was minor except for the first stanza. He includes some criticisms to show that he's a dispassionate reader and that he's not going to let their long-ago lost weekend influence what he says.

And then he says the Big Thing. He says that Louise Bogan's poetry will last "as long as the language survives." There it is. This was in one of the last reviews he wrote. It was what he hoped would be true of his own poetry.

Her poems will last as long as the language-ah, yes. That used to be, in the nineteenth century, a much-employed piece of literary praise. Macaulay used it several times. He said, for example, that Byron's poetry "can only perish with the English language." Mark Twain said that Uncle Tom's Cabin would "live as long as the English tongue shall live." Many lesser nineteenth-century reviewers used it. And it's a fearful phrase-it's an Ozymandian phrase. Because you have to ask: How long, in fact, will the English language last? Not that long maybe. Another three hundred years?

One day the English language is going to perish. The easy spoke

And even so, I want to lie in bed and just read poems sometimes and not watch TV. Regardless of what will or won't perish.

I SAT IN THE DRIVEWAY and read my old poems for about an hour in the morning. As I read them I had some driveway sand between my toes, and I felt the faceted grains rolling. And I had a combinatorial feeling. I was embarrassed but also impressed. I'd written a lot of poems, frankly. When you turn the page there is another poem. And there's another. And another. And they keep going. Somehow I have accumulated a whole bunch of poems. Each one had its itinerary-each had gone to a particular editor and gotten published somewhere, except for some that I kept back that I didn't want any editor to have, and some that no editor wanted, and then I'd collected them in a book.

I put the book down on the metal table, and I went inside and I tried to write about how a tablecloth catches the ottoman of the air as it settles down on a metal table. And now I'm back outside again sitting in the white plastic chair looking at the dew on the gas cap of my car. A fly wants to bite me on the ankle. The mosquitoes are all asleep. They're just not out at this hour. Only one biting fly. And a mourning dove, who blows through his thumbs to make that sound.

MY ANTHOLOGY has to have the right thickness. I do know that. It has to have that I'm-not-really-a-textbook textbook-ishness. It has to have a lot of love poems in it because in the end love poems are the best kind of poems. If it had a whole lot of love poems and was the right thickness, it might be adopted in college classes. September comes, and sleepy undergraduates all over the country are walking their diagonal paths to writing classes with Only Rhyme zipped away in their backpacks. I would have power and influence-maybe even a trickle of money. That's a motivator. Power and influence, baby. And maybe some of the poems I chose would make people happy. That would be my contribution. I want to include a Charles Causley poem, and a Wendy Cope poem, and a James Fenton poem. I haven't heard back from Fenton's publisher yet so I don't know if I'll get permission. I hope so.

The Fenton poem is "The Vapour Trail." I was going through a pile of old New York Review of Books's last year and I saw the title and immediately my heart leapt up, because I always want to read a poem about a vapor trail. So I approached it with that kind of high hope. That feeling of maybe this will be the definitive vapor-trail poem. And it was. It was good, and it was sad, and it was exactly, precisely what you wanted a poem about a vapor trail to be. Exactly, precisely what you wanted a poem about anything to be, in fact. It was moving, and it sang, and it had love in it, and it got you. It grabbed at your love-and-fame vitals. I tore out the whole page from the New York Review, and I clamped it to the refrigerator with a magnet.

And yesterday I took it off the refrigerator and I made two copies of it. One I mailed to Nan with a Post-it saying, "This is the poem I mentioned." And one I mailed to Roz, saying, "This is a good one. Miss you, hope you're feeling better -P."

And as I mailed the Fenton poems out I thought: See that? It's happening. The transformation, the rediscovery, the renewal. It's happening already. It's so exciting. It's all cycling around. Fenton's been doing it. My little attempts to write poems that rhyme-u

I don't have to say any of that in the introduction, though. The introduction can be quite short. Forty pages? Forget forty pages. How many people read introductions to poetry anthologies, anyway? Hardly anyone. I do, but I'm not normal. It doesn't actually matter what I say. Short is best. It should just read: "Welcome to this anthology of rhymed poetry by dead and living poets. I hope you find some things here you like. Thanks so much for your attention. And now-on with the show."

Only Rhyme would of course define me as an anthologist-i.e., as a lost soul who turned in despair to the publishing of other people's work-like old Oscar Williams. Old Father Oscar. Sure, Williams got a friendly blurb from Dylan Thomas, but everybody knew his warbling days were done. Still, I think I could live with that.

The real problem is that I've had to leave known poets out. Some of them are alive and old. A few of them I've met and like. They have strophed and so